Richard D. Ryder
b. 1940 · British psychologist and philosopher, advocate of the animal liberation movement
Richard D. Ryder is a British psychologist and philosopher, born in 1940, and one of the founding figures of the modern animal liberation movement. He is best known for coining the word 'speciesism' in 1970 and for giving a name to his own ethical position, painism.
Trained in experimental and clinical psychology, he worked as a clinical psychologist at the Warneford hospital in Oxford. He had earlier been involved in animal research himself, an experience that later led him to challenge such practices. Around 1969 he began protesting against hunting and animal experiments, and he joined a loose circle of intellectuals around the University of Oxford that gave the cause a more academic footing.
In 1975 he published Victims of Science, an attack on animal experimentation. In 1977 he chaired the RSPCA council, and he helped organise the first academic animal-rights conference, held in Cambridge. His work contributed to legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and the European Union, and he served as president of the RSPCA from 2020 to 2023.
His own position, painism, holds that every being capable of feeling pain deserves respect and rights. Ryder presents it as a third way between Peter Singer's utilitarianism and Tom Regan's rights-based ethics. His influence is visible in debates about the moral status of animals, where the word 'speciesism' has become common currency.
Key ideas
- Speciesism: excluding nonhuman beings from moral concern simply because they belong to another species is, in Ryder's view, as illogical as racism.
- Painism: the capacity to feel pain, rather than intelligence or species membership, is the basis of moral status.
- Critique of utilitarianism: one individual's pain cannot be added to or subtracted from another's, so the greatest sufferer should be the primary focus.
- A third way: the position combines a utilitarian basis with the rights-based rule against using others merely as a means to an end.
Curiosities
An idea born in the bath
Ryder later recalled that he thought of the word 'speciesism' while lying in the bath at a house in Sunningwell, Oxfordshire.
An uncomfortable question
In his 1971 essay he asked, with deliberate irony, whether the offspring of a biology professor crossed with an ape would be kept in a cage or in a cradle.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.